"As the recession forces more museums to cut staff and programs, and even consider closing, critics of this policy complain it’s hard to justify"

Time Out Chicago on an exhibition at DePaul University Art Museum that's about deaccessioning.

From the museum website:

"Most museums remove items from their collections from time to time, a process known as deaccessioning. As a rule it is done discreetly, yet the process is fascinating and the issues it raises are profound: how is quality determined? are canons of taste immutable? This exhibition spotlights the deaccessioning of objects from DePaul's collection, inviting scholars from art history, philosophy, and anthropology—and visitors—to weigh in on the works of art and their fate."

As the Time Out article points out, "the most common arguments for rules limiting deaccessioning hinge on museums’ duty to hold their collections in the public trust" (although some close observers of this debate have somehow managed never to have heard that argument). But then why is it okay for "most museums" to remove items from their collections "from time to time"?

Linkage

• What is intellectual property for?
• $8 billion a year in art crime?
• Lawsuits over fake movie posters.

Magnum Sale

The NYT's Randy Kennedy reports that the Magnum photo agency has "quietly sold" its archive of more than 180,000 "press prints" ("the kind of prints once made by the collective to circulate to magazines and newspapers[; . . .] marked on their reverse sides with decades of historical impasto — stamps, stickers and writing chronicling their publication histories — that speaks to their role in helping to create the collective photo bank of modern culture") to MSD Capital, Michael Dell's private investment firm. MSD has agreed to deposit the collection with the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin "for study and exhibition, for at least the next five years." The purchase price was not disclosed, but supposedly the Ransom Center has insured the collection for more than $100 million.

The sale includes the prints only: "The image rights will be retained by [Magnum’s] photographers and their estates."

More here from Photo District News.

Linkage

• "FBI investigates fake Clementine Hunter paintings." Related post here.
• Should museums pay parking taxes?
• Controversy over "recently discovered" plaster casts of Degas sculptures.
• An art crime novel.
• An interview with a collector of The Uncollectable Artwork.
• The Ninth Circuit denied a rehearing in Von Saher v. The Norton Simon Museum, which was the subject of my most recent column in the Journal of Art Crime.

Don't Sleep With Your Client

The Virginia State Bar has made a spectacularly stupid idea officially unethical: you can no longer sleep with your client.

"People are afraid to discuss the very possibility"

In the wake of her NYT op-ed, Judith Dobrzynski discovers that deaccessioning is "the Third Rail of the museum world."

She also links to a radio show she did with Michael Rush, the former director of the Rose Art Museum, and you couldn't ask for a better example of the craziness of this whole conversation. The two museum guys (Rush and Charles Desmarais, deputy director of the Brooklyn Museum) spend the first part of the discussion going on and on about sacred cultural heritage and how works are held by museums in the public trust (Desmarais even compares them to your wedding ring, which you of course would never sell to pay the light bill). But then, towards the end of the program, when the conversation turns to deaccessioning to raise money to buy more art, they immediately shift into: "Oh well, that happens all the time, that's no big deal, etc."

Is there a secret pact among museum people to pretend that this BLATANT INCONSISTENCY isn't there?

"White House goes after charitable deduction, again"

Politico's Ben Smith reports that the proposed tax change is back in this year's budget, but says: "expect the same fierce pushback to the write-off change -- and the same assumption on the Hill that it's dead on arrival -- as last year." More here from Mike Boehm of the LA Times.

A post from the last go-round here.